The idea of waging war in the Miky Way galaxy in this space RTS sounded good at face value. The map is massive. There are both multiplayer with leaderboards and single-player skirmish modes. It however felt a bit basic needing a lot more development to want me to return.
With this game recently released in November, I was expecting something with a bit more depth to it. For anyone looking for a simple RTS with a massive map fighting it out with other players, this one might be for you.
This right here was just my little local region. You can zoom out so far that you only see the Milky Way galaxy. With the ability to click on random parts to see who if anyone controls any regions of space.
In the multiplayer mode, you at least can put up some defenses to buy yourself time from attackers. You can more or less make it take up to 24 hours for someone's attack to land on a sector you own with the proper defenses.
This gives an active player more than enough time to get a defense up or even move resources out of the way. With how cheap it is to rebuild gathering units it’s not at least a big loss if a region you are gathering resources in gets hit by players or pirates.
As far as game tutorials go there are quite a few objectives that take you through starting gathering resources to attacking another region. Since the game is not that deep you don’t need more than a couple of sentences explaining things to you for the most part.
In a game where you can lose it all and be forced to respawn elsewhere on the map and try again. It is at least nice how quickly you can get yourself going again. I can only imagine those commanding five hundred units getting into some insane battles and gathering quite a lot of resources.
You can gather resources like materials, gas, energy, and research. Each object in a section indicates the max that can be collected from it. Along with boxes under it to indicate the maximum amount of gathers you can have.
You can even send out collectors to gather materials from a ring around an area. I often found those to yield the highest material per gatherer. Even more so when I'd send units to collect on certain types of planets for them to only be gaining a fraction of the total amount.
The game starts you off with a couple of templates of ships that do the basics from gathering to combat. You also can build your own. This is even required as the starting collecting ships for instance lack the range to leave the solar system they are in.
They have a few presets to get you started. From there you can change the shape, size, and colors of a ship. Along with what its role is, type of armor, and even engine type.
I ended up taking advantage of this system to build cheap units that could only perform local activities. These I'd consider throwaway ships. If they get taken out by players or pirates. It’s no big loss. They are quite easy to replace.
I then would build far more expensive ships that were my invading fleet. They would get me into a new solar system. Allow me to set up a new ship dock. I’d then after it was safe start mass producing in a quick manner resource gathering ships that would not take long to replace.
In a game like this, you would expect the tech tree to be some insane thing that will take forever to finish. In this game, it’s not like that. In skirmish mode on 100 times speed it took almost no time at all to train the entire tree.
This allowed me to increase resource gathering, and reduce the production cost of ships. Along with advancing technology like engines, armor, and weapons. This also meant that the AI I was against in skirmish mode was also quickly advancing as well. Giving meaning to throw away ships if they had found one of my gathering solar systems with a fully upgraded invading fleet of ships.
With how quick it is to build up in this game. I was a little shocked to see how long some players have been around in multiplayer. It looks like despite the game just being considered “released.” There has not been a full wipe in a year. That seems to be around how long the current leader on the map has survived.
Which itself is rather cool. You have some people in a rather short amount of time, crazy. Hoping playing greedy won’t end with them quickly getting wiped off the map. Then you have those who have grown slowly over time with enough staying power to defend just about anything other players could toss at them for quite some time.
The game even has an in-game marketplace to sell resources on. It seems like some players might go full economy farming. While others focus fully on combat and invading. As there is also a bounty system. Picking on the wrong person can have costly consequences in this game when they slap a massive bounty on you for those who thrive by expanding and replacing collecting it.
While I'd say this game was a bit closer to a space RTS I was looking for. I did need a little more depth. It was nice not feeling like you needed to read 1k pages just to get a basic grasp of the game as some types of games in this genre feel like is a requirement. I however needed a little more to keep me intrigued with it.
Hopefully, this will end up being one of those games I’ll check back into one day and see if it has evolved into something a bit more. The game overall seems like one that is meant to be decently quick in terms of weeks instead of years.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Stardust Exile.
Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.
